Category: Shopping

It’s a car, it’s an Autobot, it’s a Camaro. General Motors’ Chevrolet Camaro will again transform into the gutsy black and yellow Autobot hero named Bumblebee in the latest Transformers film, which hits theaters June 27.

The Camaro first appears in Transformers: Age of Extinction — or TF4 as its known among fans — as a highly modified 1967 Camaro SS. The yellow-and-black-striped 2014 concept Camaro, designed specifically for the movie at GM’s North Hollywood Design Center, shows up later on in the film.

GM’s vice president of global design, Ed Welburn — who has worked on the past three Transformers films — will act alongside the Camaro as the director of the CIA in director Michael Bay’s Transformers universe.

“Being a part of the Transformers franchise is an incredible way to showcase the design work of which GM is capable,” Welburn said in a statement.

Bay asked Welburn and the GM design team to give Bumblebee more muscle for the car’s fourth appearance in the Transformers saga, GM said in the statement.

“The Bumblebee seen in the TF4 movie will not be available to the public,” GM spokesman David Barnas wrote in an e-mail. “It is a special model designed, developed and built specifically for the movie.”

At Dale Earnhardt Jr. Chevrolet in Tallahassee, Fla., the Camaro is popular among a new generation of Camaro fans, sales manager Rusty Connell said.

“No car sells itself, but the Camaro is not hard to sell,” he said.

Around the time GM brought back the Camaro in 2010, which coincided with two Transformers appearances in 2009 and 2011, the vehicle became popular with buyers in their late 20s and early 30s, a trend that has continued over the past four years, Connell said.

“It’s a younger crowd,” he said. “But not the college crowd or anything like that.”

New ad spot

Meanwhile, starting today, GM is marketing the 2014 Camaro to yet another generation of consumers. A new video advertising spot features a young boy watching scenes of Bumblebee in TF4 on his tablet. The boy encounters the Bumblebee-style Camaro in his driveway, and leans towards the car to whisper, “Bumblebee, is that you?”

GM marketing director Steve Majoros said the advertisement highlights the cross-generational appeal of both the Camaro and the Transformers films. The Camaro “has always had a sense of amazement and wonderment attached to it,” Majoros said in an interview.

David Whiston, a market analyst at Morningstar, said the Camaro’s appearance in Transformers could be good for the entire Chevrolet brand.

“A car like the Camaro is popular with young men, and so is Transformers,” Whiston said in an interview. “It’s always good to get young people’s attention.”

The Camaro is far outside most young Transformers fans’ price range, but Whiston said the Camaro could get them thinking about other Chevrolet cars.

“A young man could see the Camaro in the movie and like it, head to the Chevrolet Web site to look at it … and end up at a Chevy dealer to buy a Cruze — or whatever he can afford,” he said.

In addition to the Camaro, the Corvette Stingray, Chevrolet Sonic rally car and Chevrolet Trax will also be featured in Transformers: Age of Extinction.

WE KNOW, WE know: we’ve been a little excited lately about the HyperAdapt 1.0, Nike’s first-ever “adaptive fit” sneaker that tightens and loosens to your foot with the push of a button. But before the HyperAdapt, there was the Nike Mag, the movie-prop high-top that debuted back in 1989’s Back to the Future 2 and inspired Nike’s designers and engineers to work for more than two decades to make power-lacing a reality. Now that Nike’s finally done it and the HyperAdapt is hitting stores next month, the company announced today that it has created a limited-edition line of fully functioning Nike Mags, all of them equipped with adaptive fit technology, that it will raffle off to benefit The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Nike has created replica Mags in the past, but none of them have come equipped with an adaptive fit. (As reported in our October cover story, the lacing system on the original Nike Mags were “powered” by crew members who literally pulled some strings to make the shoes tighten and loosen.) After all, that technology didn’t actually exist until Nike’s engineers, led by senior innovator Tiffany Beers, invented it for the HyperAdapt. But these new Nike Mags incorporate the same lacing engine and the same rechargeable lithium-polymer battery as the HyperAdapt, but they still look exactly like the shoes that Fox wore in BTTF.

Nike has produced a mere 89 pairs in a variety of men’s and women’s sizes, and most of them will be available only to those who purchase tickets online ($10 a pop) to enter a randomized digital draw (a raffle!). Buy as many as you can afford—all the proceeds go to finding a cure for Parkinson’s Disease, and the more you buy, the better your odds of nabbing a pair.

Curiosity is a trait that almost all of us share and sometimes, we tend to tear things apart in order to find out what makes them tick. This is true of almost any device we may come across in life, including our electronic devices, such as our smartphone or computer. Fortunately, there are YouTube videos that show us what is inside of those devices so we don’t have to break ours to know.

A YouTube channel, What’s Inside, answers those questions on a regular basis and they also take requests. One of the most common requests was to tear apart an Etch-a-Sketch. This toy has been around since the 1960s and, although many of us have used them, we probably don’t know what is inside of them. We just consider it to be a type of childhood magic that we all enjoy.

This video will show you exactly what is inside of the Etch-a-Sketch:

This video shows a father and son opening the Etch-a-Sketch toy. It has been popular since it was released to the market some 58 years ago but in more recent years, it was part of the movie, Toy Story. The inner workings of the Etch-a-Sketch have remained a mystery, but that mystery is about to be solved.

Of course, you could simply read the Wikipedia page about Etch-a-Sketch to learn more about what is inside. There is something satisfying, however, about watching the toy get demolished and actually seeing it for yourself. There is another benefit that comes from knowing what is on the inside of this toy as well; safety.

You’ve probably heard about a lot of different toys that have caused harm to children because they were manufactured poorly or designed improperly. Although the Etch-a-Sketch has been around for decades, it is still something that many parents want to check out before they make the purchase. Now that you know what is inside of the Etch-a-Sketch, you can make your own decision about purchasing one for your children.

It’s interesting that the Etch-a-Sketch is practically indestructible, which is not something that can be said about many of the electronic devices we carry around every day. No wonder it has been around for so long!